Hemingway's Michigan

By John Cohassey

It’s great northern air. Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration. Fine country. Good color, good northern atmosphere, absolute freedom, no summer resort stuff and lots of paintable stuff

--Ernest Hemingway to Jim Gamble 1919

Before Ernest Hemingway became obsessed with bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep sea fishing, Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay region inspired his youthful imagination. In the woods beyond the family cottage and the opulent resort hotels, he eyed the wildlife, gun in hand, and cast his line in crystal clear streams and lakes, often making friends among the Algonquian-speaking Ottawa and Ojibwa, who lived in the shadow of a lumbering-era past. Snaphots of life, in pictures or words, do not tell an entire story. Hemingway once told his brother Leicester that he had “written a number of stories about Michigan country and that country was always true, but what happens in the stories was fiction.” Creatively driven by the principle that what is left out of a story is equally important as that which is included, Hemingway’s Michigan-inspired works are inventive stories which, just behind their surface, reveal familiar faces and names; trails and hills; lakes and streams. Thus much can be understood by looking at the region and its people—Hemingway’s scenes of youth when his family joined the thousands of “resorters” visiting the Charlevoix-Petoskey region.

Like numerous others living in or near Chicago, Clarence “Ed” and Grace Hemingway of Oak Park were drawn to the northeast area of Michigan’s lower peninsula--advertised by travel and railroad companies as havens of summer outdoor activity whose temperate summer weather was conducive to good health and an escape from hay fever. Ed and Grace first came to the area in 1898 with their infant daughter Marceline, staying with Grace’s cousin, Madelaine Randall Board, on Bear Lake, today’s Walloon Lake. Impressed by their surroundings, the couple purchased land and planned to build a cottage.

The Hemingways first traveled north by steamship and train--former transportation networks of the lumber industry. Petoskey-born writer Bruce Catton, growing up near Lake Michigan, witnessed the transformation of his region into “a middle class vacation country”--how the lake-boat tourists arrived in his “impoverished land in a healing flood, pouring out on station platforms as ‘resort specials’” let off swarms of vacationers on the gangplanks, while horse-drawn carryalls waited to take them to summer hotels.

Six weeks after his birth in July 1899, Ernest traveled with his family to Walloon Lake, beginning eighteen summer visits to the North Country. At the Chicago docks eight miles from their Oak Park home, the Hemingways boarded the luxury lake-going steamship S. S. Manitou, which transported Midwestern elites and upper middle-class passengers. 274 feet long and powered by a 2500 horsepower engine, the Manitou, built in 1893, attained a top speed of 19.5 miles per hour. As one historian wrote, “The lines of this beautiful ship were long and racy, with a decided shear from bow to stern, with spars and stack set a sharp angle.” Its interior mahogany trimmed and beautifully furnished, the Manitou, “Queen of the Great Lakes,” was a floating palace of 120 staterooms, and its elaborate dining room had a ceiling of domed, oval-shaped glass.

After sailing on Lake Michigan for a twenty-four-hour trip, the Manitou docked at Harbor Springs. Praised in the local press as “The Naples of the North,” Harbor Springs was incorporated in 1880 at the lumbering industry’s height, and its population of six hundred grew as it welcomed summer when passengers arrived by steamship to be met by “hotel runners, hack men, and pursers.” From Harbor Springs the family took a Grand Rapid & Indiana Railway suburban train, “a dummy train,” for a twenty-five minute ride making numerous stops before it reached Petoskey’s GR& I station where resort carriage drivers called out the names of such establishments as the Island House, the Arlington Hotel, and the Belvedere.

In Petoskey the Hemingways boarded a suburban train for Walloon Village, which by 1911 had three stores, a bowing alley, bath house, boat livery and factory, four hotels, two churches, and a post office. Proud of its rustic character, Walloon’s local newspaper announced: “We do not boast of electric cars, paved streets and patrol wagons; we have nature’s highways and byways leading through quiet woods, or by the perfect lake.”

Once again traveling by water, the Hemingways boarded a Walloon Lake steamer--either the two-tiered Tourist or the smaller Outing—that plied the 4,320 acre lake straddling Emmett and Charlevoix counties. These small lake steamers sailed past the Indian Garden Hotel’s colonnaded portico and spacious rotunda—its porch filled with wealthy bejeweled women, exclusive card playing groups, and “porch-rockers”--along winding ravines and wooded hills, passing the Echo Beach Inn until reaching Wildwood Harbor.

From Wildwood the Hemingways reached by row-boat their lake-front lot, in a bay-like area on the lake’s east shore (Emmett County), lying between the Echo Beach Hotel and the Bacon’s farm—an acre parcel with wide, sandy lakeshore surrounded by white birches, cedars, and, farther from shore thick hemlock groves. If the landscape had changed with the logging of white pines—largely replaced by second-growth trees—its clear bodies of water still supported an abundance of fish. The Hemingways caught pike and pickerel in Walloon’s one-hundred-feet-deep waters. Today the lake teems with brown and rainbow trout, small mouth bass, bluegill, perch, walleye, and rock bass.

In tribute to her ancestral England’s Lake Region, Grace named the family’s cottage Windermere, later shortened to Windemere. A simply constructed 20 x 40 cottage costing 400 dollars, it had a brick fireplace and two window seats often serving as the children’s beds. Amenities included a wood burning range, an ice box, oil lamps, and a hand pump for water. Typical of the upper middle class, domestic help was brought from Chicago or hired locally. Foodstuffs were delivered mail order, and fresh food was purchased from nearby Bacon Farm, where twice daily the Hemingway children fetched the milk for breakfast and supper. Eventually a great deal of food came from Longfield Farm, which the family purchased across the lake.

Clarence taught all six of the Hemingway children to swim. He taught young Ernest to shoot a rifle and use a fishing rod, and eventually all the family took turns shooting clay pigeons. During summers Ernest often went barefoot, frequently dressed by his mother in a Native American outfit of fringe or in a straw hat and overalls for a Huck Finn look.

Far from Oak Park’s rows of Queen Anne homes, young Ernest let his imagination run wild, as he joined his sisters in exploring the nearby wooded hills or camping at Murphy’s Point. Across the lake from Windemere, Olds saw-mill operated until about 1911. Ernest’s oldest sister Marcelline described the the mill’s cutting of hemlock logs as having a perfume-like smell. Touring the mill, Marcelline and Ernest were treated by its skilled and kindly cook to a doughnut or a sugar cookie. The boss of the lumber camp’s mess house, the cook typically served a hearty breakfast of fried potatoes, corn, bread, syrup, and cookies, while afterward preparing the noon meal. At the camp Ernest and Marceline rode atop a pile of boards transported on a tram railway by horse-drawn flatcars, a four-mile ride to the dock at Horton Bay, in which they rode barefoot, holding on to the high-stacked lumber.

Nearly a mile east from Windemere, the Hemingway children visited Indian Camp, a former lumber camp where Ojibwa families lived in old outbuildings, or “shanties.” In summer the women picked berries, selling them door-to-door to cottage dwellers for fifteen cents a quart. Ernest’s sister Madelaine, known as Sunny, claimed to have “loved” the smell of the Indian Camp, which Hemingway’s fictional Nick Adams describes as a “sick sweet smell,” smoky, sometimes odorous of sweet grass that lingered long after its inhabitants departed.

Nick Adams describes the Ojibwa as being “very nice.” At the camp men cut and stripped the bark of Eastern Hemlock trees (the only hemlocks native to Michigan) used in the industrial tanning of hide. Sunny recalled shouts of “Timber!” as Ojibwa men urged the children to clear the way as not to be harmed. Hemlocks had grown in abundance among White Pine and other hardwoods, and, after bark-stripping season lasting from May to July, the Ojibwa “barkstrippers” sold their product at three to five dollars a cord to Shaw’s Tannery in Boyne City, which by 1907 produced six million pounds of shoe leather annually (Petoskey had a small tannery as well). The Hemingway children also watched the women making baskets from sweet grass and porcupine quills. This ancient woodland Indian art involved the sewing of the colored vegetable-dyed quills that were “moistened in the mouth and flattened by being pulled out by the teeth or with special bone flatteners.”

One of the most captivating Native American-inspired events was the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad sponsored “Hiawatha Indian Play,” presented at nearby Wa-ya-ga-mug on Round Lake. Based upon Longfellow’s 1855 poem, this pageant production in the woods—complete with a man-made cliff--had an all Native-American cast, originally featuring participants from the Garden River Reserve, Ontario. The pageant ran from July through September (1905-1917), entertaining vacationers in the wooden grandstand with dances, story-telling, and songs, before Hiawatha, his canoe pulled by an underwater cable, miraculously departed alone into the sunset without the use of a paddle. As ersatz as the play seems, it impressed one local Native American who recalled it as “beautiful. They had real Indians playing the parts. They had their real Indian costumes and they had canoes going across the water.” Apart from the play, Wa-ya-ga-mug catered to every tourist taste, offering--among waters sports, tennis, and croquet--a hotel, rented wigwams, a restaurant, and an “Indian workshop” where tourists watched Ottawa and Ojibwa making rustic furniture and other various items.

Although the Hiawatha play thrilled the Hemingway children, Ernest soon saw the Native Americans’ severe poverty when the lumber industry no longer offered employment. Nick Adams describes Native Americans’ thirst for alcohol--those who lay drunk on the roadside, or passed out on railroad tracks. The only Native American known to the Hemingways as having made money, Simon Green, sometimes accompanied Ed and Ernest for rifle shooting practice. The Native Americans referred to Doctor Hemingway, much revered by his son for being a crack shot, as “Eagle Eye,” and they considered him a friend for his treating without charge many of the locals in Indian Camp. Just as Hemingway fictionally, through the young eyes of Nick Adams, joined his father and uncle for a nighttime visit to Indian Camp to deliver a baby by jack-knife cesarean, he made much of his supposed first sexual encounter with a Native American girl, Prudence Boulton. What may have occurred between him and the sister of friend, Rich Boulton, is debated still; nonetheless, Ernest’s claim reveals a writer’s necessity for creating myths around him. Hemingway’s telling of how he lost his virginity to an Indian girl in the northern woods no doubt sounded exotic to his Oak Park friends, or to those gathered around his bedside in Red Cross hospitals during the First World War.

In his increasing interest in sex and other pastimes forbidden by the family, Ernest joined a new generation in challenging the manners and morals of his upper middle class parents--Victorians who expected their children to become educated and employed in a respectable profession. By 1915 Ernest began sleeping outside the cottage in a tent or at a friend’s family cottage. He was still the dutiful son, working at chores and at Longfield Farm the family had purchased across the lake. But Grace who had once dressed her son girlishly to look like Marceline’s twin, seemed to be losing touch with the teenage Ernest as did her husband, once admired by Ernest as a skillful outdoorsman. Eventually Clarence took longer summer respites from Windemere. Though he claimed this time alone in Oak Park was needed to settle his nerves and to earn more family income, he was suffering from severe bouts of depression, which Ernest perceived not as mental illness but as a weakness in character resulting from Grace’s domineering personality.

Ernest returned in 1919 as a decorated lieutenant of the Red Cross ambulance having served on the Italian front. His leg wounds still painful when arriving in northern Michigan during June, he stayed, as he had much of the summer during 1917, with one of his closest “pals,” Bill Smith. Non-competitive, witty, and a good-natured listener, Smith figured fictionally in several Nick Adams stories and was a main source for The Sun Also Rises’ Bill Gorton. Bill resided with his aunt and uncle at their Horton Bay cottage, where Ernest escaped his family--drinking, smoking Russian cigarettes, and riding to Charlevoix in Bill’s Buick Six searching for “flesh pots.”

To visit Bill and his sister Katy Smith, Ernest hiked four miles to the former lumber town of Horton Bay. Founded in 1876 on Lake Charlevoix (then Pine Lake), the hamlet of Horton Bay during Hemingway’s youth had several homes and buildings, including the Horton Bay Methodist church, the Horton Bay House, (now the Red Fox Inn), and Jim Dilworth’s blacksmith shop. Horton Bay’s high-front-style general store, well-stocked with merchandise, had glass-covered display cases and shelves of tin can goods; it sold bulk candy, coffee, tobacco products, and clothing.

Fishing-obsessed, Hemingway, during his apprentice years, cast his line in nearby School Creek and Bear Creek not far from Brethren, and caught trout on Horton Creek’s marshy banks. Using a technique learned from a local Native American, he fished with “baited whole skinned perch,” yielding him a large catch.

Later he joined friends on fishing trips, packing a tent, a rifle and some food, often taking local trains and reaching the river destinations on foot. Southeast of Horton Bay they visited “the Pine Barrens,” an area today called Pigeon River County for its once large passenger pigeon population. The Barrens were home to some of Hemingway’s favorite rivers--the Sturgeon, the Black, and the Pigeon. When fishing the Sturgeon Hemingway often took the train and camped at the village of Wolverine, lying nineteen miles north of Gaylord in Cheboygan County. He reached his most favored, the Black River--reputed at this time as having Michigan’s best brook trout stream--by Vanderbilt Road from Gaylord “and camped where the Black crosses Tin Shanty Road.”

Though Hemingway wrote informing his friends that the Pine Barrens could be easily traversed by car through open land nearly free of underbrush, pictures from the period reveal the area to be more difficult to travel than Ernest claimed. To held lure his friends north, Ernest wrote Howell Jenkins, informing that “the Barrens Country is the greatest I’ve ever been in and that there are some great camping places on the Black.” To another friend, Jim Gamble, he lauded the area as “a great place to laze around and swim and fish when you want to. And the best place in the world to do nothing. It’s great country . . . .” In 1919 Ernest rode in Bill Smith’s Buick through the Barrens (at this time the area was being set aside as a 105, 000-acre National Forest).

In September 1919, Ernest joined two high school friends on a fishing trip to the Fox and Little Fox Rivers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an excursion that later served as the basis for the brilliant short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” They reached the Fox by first stopping in Seney. A once-thriving lumber town about half way between Newberry and Munsing, Seney experienced an economic boom when the Alger Smith Company logged the area in the 1880s. A decade later lumbering turned the region’s forest into a landscape of stumps that burned before the First World War.

Ernest’s fishing party reached Seney by the GR&I railroad north from Petoskey to Mackinaw City. Ferried across the straights to St. Ignace, their train car was then hooked to an engine of the Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic Railroad Company, which took them to Seney. Whether by way of newspaper stories about Seney’s lawless frontier--“one of the toughest places” in Michigan--or tales told to him, Ernest was aware of its reputation. Getting off at Seney’s train station he encountered a quiet, desolate place, with a few buildings—none of the former hotels, dozens of saloons, houses of prostitution, or stores once lining its streets. The trio of young fishermen inspected the ruins of the Grondin Hotel, named for Phil Grondin, a lumberjack cook turned entrepreneur, whose establishment had burned the previous summer. Hemingway’s first unpublished draft of “Big Two Hearted River,” had the sojourners view the ruined hotel’s “twisted iron work, melted to hard rust,” and a burned gun cabinet’s melted guns “and the cartridges a solid mass of copper.” But the Grondin (The Mansion Hotel of “Big Two-Hearted River”) had not been engulfed by the blaze ravaging the countryside. No such fire ever threatened Seney’s downtown; a cigarette-ignited mattress reportedly had been the source of the hotel’s destruction.

From Seney the young fishermen likely walked north along the railroad tracks, and camped the first day of this week-long trip, as Jack Jobst notes, “two miles above Seney, where the East Branch of the Fox cuts across a railroad embankment.” The rest of the trip was spent in an area north of the town where they fished the Fox and Little Fox. A fishing guide describes the Fox—in some places twenty-five to thirty feet wide with a sand or fine-gravel bottom--as rising “north of the old lumbering town of Seney in east Alger County, crossing into northern Schoolcraft County,” where it is a very good “fly-fishable stream near the old Wagner Dam.” In “Big-Two Hearted River,” Hemingway made the trip a solitary excursion rather than one shared among old friends. But at the time of Hemingway’s writing it 1924, he had made the transition from sharp-eyed reporter to literary artist. Meticulous in selecting poetic titles for his works, he replaced the Fox River with the name of the Big Two-Hearted River, lying beyond Tauqaumenon Falls and flowing into Lake Superior.

When the Hemingways closed up Windemere in late fall of 1919, Ernest stayed behind with Jim and Elizabeth Dilworth in Horton Bay. Jim--a stout, mustached hard-cider drinker--owned Dilworth’s Black Smith Shop, a red-painted salt-box-style building along the road in Horton Bay. Ernest also admired Jim’s wife Elizabeth, a.k.a. “Aunty Beth,” proprietor of Horton Bay’s Pinehurst Inn, noted among tourists for her excellent fifty-cent chicken dinners. One local recalled how Elizabeth performed “magic on her cast-iron stove with chicken and dumplings and gravy, vegetables from her garden out back, and fresh bread and desserts way out of the ordinary.” A non-paying Pinehurst guest, Ernest occupied a bunk in the annex shed off the big kitchen, where he read and wrote letters to friends.

Unknown to the Dilworths, they inspired the characters of Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan,” centered around the brutal seduction of a waitress on the hemlock-plank dock of Horton Bay. Not published until 1923, “Up in Michigan” shocked Ernest’s mother and sister Marceline in its obvious description of the Dilworths, and the use their first names, in a story of a rape/seduction committed by the fictional Jim.

Back at his parents’ Oak Park home, Ernest, writing unsuccessfully, felt the need to go north and stayed for a time at the Pinehurst Inn until Elizabeth closed the inn for the season. Following a lead of a newspaper advertisement, he rented a second-floor room in Petoskey at the widow Evva Potter’s rooming house--furnished with a wrought iron bed, chest of drawers, and small desk on State and Woodland Streets. With the assistance of a local friend, Edwin “Dutch” Pailthorp, son of a prominent lawyer and judge, Ernest placed a keg of apple cider in his room near the radiator, fortifying its contents with cracked corn and raisins for the making of hard cider. On a typewriter loaned to him by Bill Smith, Ernest wrote commercially-oriented stories subsequently rejected by the popular magazine market.

Nine miles from Walloon Lake, Petoskey had grown by 1890 into a population of nearly 5,000. At this time, a former resident recalled, “Crack passenger trains with Pullmans, diners, and vestibules throughout, brought people and more people made Petoskey in fourteen hours from Cincinnati five hundred miles away, against the more than twenty-three hours of the old days.” By 1914 many of Petoskey’s summer population of nearly 25,000 visited the downtown gas-light district offering a variety of shops and stores. Lake-going steamships arrived at Petoskey’s port, and the city’s two depots welcomed travelers on the Grand Rapid & Indiana (on which the Hemingways traveled) and the Chicago & West Michigan Railway. At this time, hotel room and board for the finest accommodations cost three dollars a day or eighteen dollars a week. Bruce Catton, whose grandfather lived in Petoskey, described its “summer hotels; huge and brightly painted, made of wood, with broad verandas all about, commanding a fine view of sunset over the water.” At these establishments, families enjoyed a low-key summer experience near their accommodations. Guests took part in games of baseball and football, and tennis, others bicycled. Children played on the beach; families sailed in rented lake boats, and in the evenings older guests joined the college set in listening to a society dance band. “An adult put in most of his time in a rocking chair on the porch,” Catton wrote, “keeping cool . . . of the hay fever zone, placidly digesting the huge meals of whitefish and lake trout that were placed before him everyday.”

One of Petoskey’s thirteen grand resort hotels, the one-hundred-room Hotel Perry--Ernest once stayed there after a 1916 hiking trip—became of the young writer’s nighttime destinations. In Petoskey without the summer tourist crowds, Ernest felt he could begin to write seriously, and he made some money shoveling gravel for the county. Ernest wore old shoes and pants, a visored-cap, and a sheepskin-lined black leather jacket, hanging around Petoskey in the afternoons often waiting for a girl friend. He spent time reading newspapers in the local library, a Carnegie-funded neo-classical building, well-stocked with books.

In his second-floor room he first conceived the basis for the short story “The Killers,” in which Ole Anderson, “The Swede,” stoically lies in bed awaiting the hit men who are out to kill him. After writing in the morning, Hemingway usually ate at the Grill Café at 438 Lake Street (currently the site of Arlington Jewelers, next door to today’s City Park Grill), opposite the suburban train station. The Grill Café served whitefish, lake trout, frog legs, soft-shell crabs, and lobster. At Jesperson’s Restaurant on Howard Street, reputed to be Hemingway’s favorite eatery, he is said to have joined Dutch Pailthorp and other friends in eating good home-style cooking.

Petoskey was the setting for Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring (1926), a short work of satire, largely targeting Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein and other modernist writers, which also mocked the ineffective use of the narrative flashback. Set in winter and early spring, Torrents describes the “sunset over Petoskey Harbor, the lake now frozen and great blocks of ice jutting up over the breakwater.” Torrents’ Scripps O’Neil sees through the window of McCarthy’s Barbershop white-jacketed barbers at work. This establishment in the Flatiron building on Howard Street, according to local lore, offered Ernest with good conversation and magazines to read. Also on Howard Street, the New Braun Hotel and Restaurant served as a center point of Torrents in the fictional guise of “Brown’s Beanery”—“Best by Test.”

In mid-December 1919, the winter setting of Torrents, Hemingway spoke at a Petoskey Library-sponsored Ladies’ Aid Society event. In a wood-trimmed library room, his back to a fireplace, he stood before his audience dressed in his Italian uniform, recounting his war experiences. At this event he met a wife of the wealthy “dime-store mogul,” Ralph Connable, who lived in Canada. This meeting led to a job in Toronto looking after the Connable’s teenage son. Through his employer’s intercession Hemingway’s was hired by the Toronto Star, and during that winter and spring, he contributed a number of articles.

His job having ended with the Connables, Ernest returned to Windemere in June 1920, riding in Bill Smith’s car, most likely taking a two-to-three day trip on the West Michigan Pike. The Pike road stretched five hundred-miles near Lake Michigan, from South Bend to Benton Harbor, Ludington, Manistee, Traverse City, Charlevoix, Petoskey, and Mackinaw City. Traveling this route, Hemingway and his friends defiantly broke the Prohibition law transporting alcohol that had little chance of confiscation--in that, as he wrote Howell Jenkins, “I don’t believe cars are searched at all.”

Much to his parent’s disappointment, Ernest hung out with friends and still refused attending college, notably Grace’s choice of Oberlin. Not one to have tolerated much tension when dealing with children, Grace demanded respect from her insolent son, who, along with her husband, did not take seriously--despite Ernest’s experiences as reporter for the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star Weekly--his vocation as a writer. When Grace built a private cottage on the farm across Walloon Lake, Ernest condemned her as wasting money that could have gone to pay for her children’s education. Yet as Hemingway’s biographer, Michael Reynolds, points out, Grace paid the one-thousand dollar cost of the cottage with the money she earned from teaching voice lessons, and she and her husband were not as yet in financial straits. To help makes ends meet, Clarence stayed in Oak Park for longer periods working at his medical practice--long absences from Windemere that left Grace to deal with unruly Ernest, and making for a confrontation between mother and son.

Clarence’s long absence from Windemere during the summer of 1920 left Grace to deal with the defiant Ernest. Both strong-minded and artistic individuals, mother and son harshly criticized each other. Perhaps even more outraged than his wife, Clarence’s letters demanded that Ernest leave the cottage and find employment somewhere beyond Horton Bay. Five days after Ernest’s twenty-first birthday on July 21, 1920, he and Ted Brumback joined several younger females, including Hemingway sisters Ursula and Sunny and Elizabeth Loomis and her guest--in a late-night picnic at Ryan’s Point on Walloon Lake. After a failed search for the missing youths, and their coming home in the late-night hours, an outraged Grace placed much of the blame on Ernest, giving him a letter--Clarence thought it her most masterfully composed—voicing her expectations, disappointments, and banishing him from Windemere, a restriction to be lifted only when Ernest showed respect for his parents and became employed.

This generational stand-off symbolized a rebelliousness that Hemingway would flaunt in art and life, helping to shape the 1920s rebel image. To the incorrigible Ernest, this “kicking out business,” as he called it, intensified his contempt for his mother--whom biographer Kenneth Lynn called, “the dark queen of Hemingway’s inner world”--and came as a welcome break from his parents’ stultifying values.

Taking refuge in Horton Bay, the carefree writer spent summer days camping, hunting, or irresponsibly shooting glass “insulators off electric poles.” In letters to friends he invited them north to hunt and fish, loaf and laze in the good air, and enjoy campfires under the moonlight. Hemingway thought of returning to Italy, traveling to Asian ports, or possibly exploring America. “I hate buzzing all over Europe when there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen,” he wrote a friend. “I get so darned much fun out of working on a paper and writing and I like this country . . . . But then—It’s all in the lap of the Gods.”

Before leaving for Paris, Ernest made the best of his last Michigan summers. Luring north Ted Brumback, Jacques Pentecost, Howell Jenkins, and Dick Smale, Ernest joined them, in August 1920 for a six-day trip to the Pine Barrens by way of a rented car and trailer. At dusk they cooked by campfire their daily catch, and during the moon-lit evenings sang to the playing of Ted Brumback’s mandolin, until falling asleep near the campfire’s dying coals.

Fall approached. With no source of steady employment, Hemingway weighed his options, telling a friend jokingly that he would “have to go to work in the cement plant,” a reference to the newly constructed Portland Cement Company plant south of Petoskey. Such realities prompted Ernest to abandon his dreamy notions of worldly travels. After his father closed Windemere in October, Ernest stayed for a time in Horton Bay picking apples at the Charles Farm, before riding south with Bill Smith to Chicago.

Confidant of his becoming a writer, Hemingway scrambled for work while rooming with Bill Horne in Chicago and later with Bill Smith’s brother, Y.K. In late October 1920, he met Hadley Richardson of St. Louis. In a much-written-about courtship, Hemingway quickly vowed to marry Hadley, while fearing matrimony would, as Carlos Baker asserted, “destroy his kind of life.” In April, Ernest wrote Bill Smith about his beloved Michigan rivers: “Guy loves a couple or three streams all his life and love’s one better than anything in the world—falls in love with a girl and the goddamn stream can dry up for all he cares. Only the hell of it is that the country has had a hold on me as ever.”

Having a tendency to rush into amorous relationships, Ernst afforded himself little time in choosing between bachelorhood and marriage. Rather than an elaborate wedding in Oak Park or St. Louis, Ernest and Hadley decided to have the ceremony in Horton Bay. A few days before the wedding, Hemingway got in a short fishing trip on the Sturgeon with Howell Jenkins and Charlie Hopkins. Ernest and Hadley, joined by family and friends were married on September 3, 1921, at the Horton Bay Methodist Church. Dinner was then served at the Pinehurst Inn, and the couple honeymooned at Windemere.

With a job as a Toronto Star overseas correspondent and introductions from novelist Sherwood Anderson, Ernest and Hadley then went to Paris. In Farewell To Arms (1929) Hemingway hints at the end of something in his own life. Lieutenant Henry, while lodging in an Italian barn, remarks: “We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back.”

What is more certain is that Michigan’s river country never left the man. In 1928, when his second wife Pauline was pregnant with their son Patrick, Ernest initially wanted to have the baby delivered at a local Northern Michigan hospital--a decision opposed by Clarence, who insisted on the better care afforded by a major hospital. Several years later Hemingway revealed his longing for Michigan, when in Green Hills of Africa (1935) when his autobiographical character marvels at the East-African sky, claiming it equal in beauty only to those of Italy, Spain, and the autumn skies of Cuba and northern Michigan.

In the mid-1930s Grace--widowed and in financial straights--sold her beloved Oak Park home on Kenilworth Avenue, and then deeded Windemere to Ernest. In 1937 Windemere’s now overprotective owner reminded his sister Marceline, in a harshly worded letter, of his sole ownership and laid down the law concerning who stayed at the cottage. In the same letter, written from Key West, where the keys to Windemere were kept in a desk drawer, he spoke of traveling to Michigan that summer, a trip he did not make.

In 1947, on his way to Sun Valley, Idaho, Ernest stopped overnight in Petoskey with a friend. His said return in the 1950s has become local lore as have the many “Hemingway” sightings over the years. What is certain is that this world famous author still held firm to his connection with the “Last Good Country.” During the 1950s when Sunny lived at Windemere, Ernest wrote her instructions about his authorized repairs and “not to sell it unless you need the money for food.” After Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway deeded Windemere to Sunny, with the provision that her son, Ernie Mainland, be given survivorship rights. Upon Sunny’s death in 1995, Mr. Mainland, a Petoskey native, moved into the cottage with his wife Judy, making a few changes, yet retaining much of the original cottage—its wood paneling, Grace’s portrait of Ernest hanging by the fireplace, and the many books read by the Hemingway children.

For Hemingway northern Michigan was an imagined frontier, and he once told his son Gregory, while in Cuba during the 1940s, about how he had “caught his first trout [there] and how beautiful the virgin forests were before the loggers came.” Hemingway’s use of the north woods in his fiction reveals memory’s passionate hold on a brilliantly imaginative mind. Gone are the Indian Camp, the mills, the old docks, most of the grand hotels, yet pilgrims to Hemingway country look for existing landmarks described by Nick Adams and his author who, nearly a century ago, made art out his surroundings, summers turned into the autumn of life, in stories created far away from the region that inspired them.

 

 

 

 

The family’s lake travel by steamship continued until 1917, when they traveled north by automobile.

In high school Ernest wrote an unpublished “passion play,” “No Worst than a Bad Cold,” based upon the Hiawatha play and Native Americans he met in the area.

Brick constructed, the Hotel Perry is the only Petoskey resort hotel to survive destruction by fire or demolition.

Windemere was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968.

 

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